Dr Pepper Is Beefing Up Its Snack Game

My dad has always held that the best snack combo out there consists of some exceedingly salty McDonald’s fries with an ice-cold Dr Pepper. Now, let’s do a little thought experiment: What if the fries were instead made of dried beef and then that beef was Dr Pepper flavored? Would it taste as good? Would my dad still like it? Well, as it turns out, this is not just a thought experiment—Dr Pepper beef jerky has escaped from the mad food science lab in our collective brains and is now running free in the real world. That’s right, Dr Pepper and Jack Link’s have collaborated to bring us Dr Pepper beef jerky and Dr Pepper meat sticks. Now I just need my dad to weigh in!

Will Dr Pepper beef jerky taste like meat candy? Or like when you cook a brisket in Coca-Cola? Or like when you dip beef in soda (as one does)?

As a soda-beef virgin myself, I must say I don’t have a great frame of reference here for what this might taste like. I assume almost teriyaki-like but with more spices? Seeing as the “Jack Link’s Wild Dr. Pepper-Flavored Meat Stick” (yes, that is its full Christian name) has actually been out at Circle K locations and on Amazon since January, I took to the internet to see what the Wild Dr Pepper-Flavored Meat Stick has done for this world thus far. And it turns out, not a whole lot. I saw it described as everything from “disgusting” to “cherry flav meat lol” to “I think hell yeah brother” (unclear if that last person actually tried it). A reviewer on YouTube said it isn’t too offensive, and that tastes sweeter than normal jerky sticks but doesn’t have much Dr Pepper flavor. With reviews like that, you may be stoked to know that come June, Jack Link’s and Dr Pepper will be releasing yet another jerky collab: Jack Link’s Dr. Pepper-Flavored Beef Jerky. The difference? This one doesn’t come in a stick, which gives us all the chance to live out our dreams of gnawing on soda beef while watching a period drama and yearning for simpler times when beef was just beef and also medicine was a lot less advanced and—you know, actually, I’m okay with society advancing to soda beef levels. If nothing else, it is quite fun to write about. That said, if I do see these products in a store over the next few months, I will be buying them. Talk about a meat cute. Plus it’s a Dr—can’t go wrong!